Introduction
How does hip-hop from the 1990s differ from hip-hop today?
With the aim to answer to this question, It has been decided to look for reliable playlists on Spotify through which it could have been gained valuable insight into the most remarkable differences within and between the two time periods. In order to do so, two playlists have been chosen as corpus of data, namely “Hip Hop 90s” from “Hip Hop Heroes” and “Hip Hop 2019: Top100 Rap HITS 2019 / Rap 2019 New Hip Hop Songs” from “Filtr Espana”, and have been analysed by comparing their key features. The two playlists contain respectively 64 and 100 tracks. These two playlists were chosen since they presented similar features in terms of number of followers and number of tracks, and also they contained tracks from the most famous and representative artists of the two time periods.
A closer look at the two playlists: is Hip Hop become faster in 20 years?
After that the audio features from both playlists have been gathered using “spotifyr”, it has been decided to represent the two data sets in two different scatterplots with speechiness on the x-axis and tempo on the y-axis. As a result, it can be observed on the scatterplots that overall Hip-Hop got significantly faster in 20 years, since most of the 90’s tracks are below the 100 BPM level while most of the today’s tracks cover the range from 100 BPM to 175. In addition, from the scatterplot can be observed also a couple of outliers, which are two today’s hip hop songs, namely “Around the Way Girl” and “Party Up”, that surprisingly are above the 200 BPM, representing the fastest tracks of both data sets. However, after I listened to both the songs, it must be said that in this case Spotify’s tempo detection was far from the truth.
The values of speechiness are slightly higher for the 90’s tracks, demonstrating a little decrease of the use of spoken words in today’s tracks. But here too, there’s an outlier represented by today’s track “Endless Summer Freestyle”, which has the highest amount of spoken words with the value of 0.4630. In addition, the average danceability and energy for both playlists have been obtained but those haven’t shown any remarkable difference for these features, the values of which are marginally higher in 90’s tracks. However, the energy of the tracks has been mapped to the size of the dots, in order to make more information visible.
Finally, as it can be observed in the scatterplot the dots are coloured by “mode”, but in both playlist it has been found a certain balance between songs in major and in minor and there’s no remarkable trend to be noticed. The increasing acceleration of today’s Hip Hop tracks appear to be at the moment the most interesting finding.
Chromagram of the song “Endless Summer Freestyle”
Annotations of the piece’s key moments will be provided tomorrow. (The chromagram should be interactive, as it outputs on rstudio but when i knit it into html then it turns static).